Hello Folks, Good news!
"Important Notice -- Take note that the NTDB, CanImage and CanMatrix products will now be available at no cost only at the GeoGratis website." http://www.cits.rncan.gc.ca/cit/servlet/CIT/site_id=01&page_id=1-004.htmlNote that the free CanMatrix available on the same server is only the half-resolution version (160dpi). The 300dpi is still for sale only and restricted distribution. A tip though, if you want the 300dpi buy it from
http://www.softmaptech.com/ for a fraction of the cost from NRCAN (with collars clipped to boot). Rumour has it that in a year or two the restrictions will be lifted here too.
If you already know what you're looking for, skip the 20-clicks interface at
http://www.geogratis.ca/geogratis/en/index.html and dive straight into ftp://ftp2.cits.rncan.gc.ca/pub/geogratis/bndt/
A command like this will grab all of the 250k 105 series in one go:
[windows, with cygwin tools in path; double up % to put in a batch file]
wget --continue --recursive --level 2 ftp://ftp2.cits.rncan.gc.ca/pub/geogratis/bndt/250k_shp_en/105/*
Then unpack:
cd ftp2.cits.rncan.gc.ca\pub\geogratis\bndt\250k_shp_en\105\
for /r %f in (*.zip) do unzip -d . %f
and mush together with OGR goodness (orders of magnitude
faster than ArcGIS FeatureClassToXXX):
mkdir merged
for %f in (*wetland*.shp) do (
( if not exist merged\wetlands.shp ogr2ogr -f "esri shapefile" merged\wetlands.shp %f ) else (
ogr2ogr -f "esri shapefile" -update -append merged\wetlands.shp %f )
)
Enjoy!
-matt
